How can we improve Talis Aspire Reading Lists?

Compulsory setting of importance field

The majority of our academics are not using the 'Set importance' tag for each item on their list. Could this be made a compulsory field when adding the item? This information is required to enable the correct number of items to be purchased and for student information of the books importance.

We have been asked to request this as part of our Kent Inclusive Packages to assist with accessibility and inclusivity. If a list has prioritised reading it facilitates our efforts buy accessible items in a timely fashion. We would like to look at making importance setting compulsory in order for the academic to publish their list.

I discussed this recently with Laura Unwin and she suggested I raise again as it might be something that could move out of backlog, now Reviews Refresh is nearing completion. It would be hugely helpful for our Acquisitions process if we could make Importance compulsory. We would want to do this for books only. And presumably we could opt to have it switched on at institution level rather than it effecting all customers?

I would like the importance field to have a default setting rather than being blank. The majority of our items are 'Recommended' - so rather than having to input this manually every time, the user could choose to change 'Recommended' to 'Key' if the item was more important and to 'Background' if it was less important.

I would prefer this to remain non-compulsory, at least for the moment. We don't rely on Aspire for ordering and the way the importance feature is currently used doesn't always map very well to our lists.

eg. for us a "prescribed text" would normally mean a textbook students are expected to purchase, but there is no option for other required readings, such as from journals or online sources.

A lot of our academics also like to have the prescribed text and required / recommended / suggested readings in separate sections, as this is more obvious for the students and allows navigation directly to a section via the Table of Contents. This makes setting the importance tags somewhat redundant. There is an option to sort by importance, but that completely removes the sections so you can no longer see which topic or week a reading is needed for (if the list is set up that way) and means an extra click to change the sorting every time you look at the list.